Director of Engineering (Player-Coach)

We're the all-in-one agentic marketing platform. AI-native from day one. We're not joining a category, we're defining it.

We're looking for the best engineer in the room. Someone who owns the architecture of our agentic systems, writes critical-path code every day, and makes everyone around them sharper. If you want real ownership, move fast, and raise the bar every week, keep reading. If you stopped coding when you moved into leadership, this role will be a hard adjustment.

What you'll own

• Architect the systems running millions of autonomous executions a day: multi-agent orchestration, LLM cost and quality tradeoffs, distributed state, and sub-100ms latency on the critical path.

• Spend roughly 60% of your time in the code. Review critical-path work, run incident forensics, and solve distributed-system problems in the system, not in a doc.

• Own the pipeline where about 70% of production code is AI-generated and ships on a daily autonomous cadence. Keep it fast, safe, and accountable.

• Set the technical standard by living it: TDD, trunk-based development, daily deployment. Practice, not policy.

• Own the cost, quality, and speed trifecta: token efficiency, model selection, context window management, and the architecture calls that compound into millions saved or lost a month.

• Grow the next technical leaders by working beside them. Your team gets better by watching you solve hard problems, not by sitting through standups.

You'll thrive here if...

• You've operated at the frontier. Agentic systems, LLM orchestration, long-running autonomous services, and you've shipped production code to prove it.

• You've hit a scaling wall and engineered your way out, not process-managed your way around it.

• You don't wait to be told what to do. You see the gap and you move.

• Deadlines don't rattle you. Ambiguity doesn't either.

• You're an AI power user, not someone who's "open to learning it someday."

• You communicate clearly, especially when things are unclear.

• You have opinions and you're not afraid to bring them.

• You can laugh at a chaotic week on Friday and mean it.

What we're looking for

• 7+ years shipping production code. You've been the person others escalate to when the system is on fire.

• Real production experience putting LLMs into distributed systems: reliability under uncertainty, cost and latency optimization. Hands-on multi-agent or long-running autonomous work is what sets you apart.

• Strong Python backend (Django, Celery), React on the front, and distributed systems on Kubernetes across multiple regions.

• Fluency across the data layer: PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, Redis, and vector databases.

• Hands-on with LLM APIs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Google), prompt management, and eval frameworks for AI-generated code in production.

• Comfortable with LGTM-style observability, and the discipline to back your changes with numbers: cycle time, deployment frequency, MTTR.

• The systems you've shipped matter more than the headcount you've managed.

• You work EST hours. We're remote worldwide, but the team overlaps on Eastern time and so will you.

What working here actually looks like

High expectations. Real ownership. Things change fast and we don't apologize for it. You'll work with smart people who push you, a product that keeps getting better, and a team that's genuinely building something new.

There are zero project managers here. You report to a CEO who codes daily and will read your pull requests. The work is technical because the problems are technical, and most of them aren't taught in universities or discussed in most engineering orgs.

We'll probably give you more to own than you expected. That's on purpose.

We use AI every day, across every function. That's just how we work.

About Search Atlas

Search Atlas helps marketing teams move faster, make smarter decisions, and do more with less. We're a $35M ARR company, 215 people, bootstrapped, and building the infrastructure for the next era of marketing. No outside funding. No fluff. Just product.

Location: Remote worldwide. You must work EST hours.

Compensation: $40 to $50 USD per hour.

Benefits: 15 days PTO. Christmas Day and New Year's Day paid off.